Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

“There’s more than one,” I said.

“Yep. And they stay in communication by cell phone. People sneaking around behind my back, it chaps my ass, partner.”

I read the note. It said: “Call this number.”

I studied the number, then called it.

There was an answer right away. A man’s voice, almost singsong-like.

“Mr. Statler. You have been drawn in, and now that you are in, I should tell you that we have captured your queen.”

“I don’t get it,” I said, although I did.

“It’s a game, and your brother brought you in, and then you became a player in the game. But that’s all you are, a player. A pawn. A knight maybe. There are others and you don’t know their will, and you do not know our purpose.”

“Belinda has nothing to do with this,” I said. “Actually, neither do I.”

“She is with you, and therefore, by extension, she is in the game because you are, and we have decided you have something to do with it, and that is good enough.”

“A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse, huh?”

“Exactly,” the voice said.

“Let her go, and I’ll take her place.”

“Doesn’t work that way. And another thing, you have brought another player into the game. The high yellow you got with you. Intriguing, isn’t it, that we should know so much? We know a lot about you because we have been watching you. Acknowledge to him that we know he is there.”

“He knows you know, and he doesn’t give a damn,” I said.

“Acknowledge.”

I paused and said to Booger, loud as I could: “He says I should acknowledge that they know you are here, and that you are a high yellow.”

“I think I’m more copper-colored,” Booger said.

“Okay,” I said back into the phone. “I told him, and I owe you one for the punch in the face and the kick in the ribs.”

“You hear quite well. Perhaps you have good instincts. Perhaps it’s your time in Iraq that has made you alert, paranoid maybe. But remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Now, we will trade your brother for the girl. We consider him a more important piece in the game.”

“Who’s we?”

The voice on the phone laughed. “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? That would ruin the game.”

“This is no game, buddy,” I said.

“Sure it is. Sooner you figure that out, the better, because all that matters is how you play the game. There is no purpose to life, Mr. Statler. There is only chaos from which you can create purpose, and a game is as purposeful as you can get. There is no real reason anyone feels for anyone other than the lie we tell ourselves. The lie where we make importance out of the simplicity of emptiness.”

“You ought to put that last line in a fortune cookie,” I said. “The rest of that shit, it would take a whole box of cookies to say it. And it would still be shit.”

“Insults,” the voice said. “I’d save them right now. I was saying how you failed to take no for an answer, when in the end a no is as good as a yes. Humans are fools. They try and jump-start the dead; dead people and dead ideas. We convince ourselves there is more to our life than there is, and truth is, we are nothing more than empty shells motivated by some kind of electrical current. To make it through the years, we create games. The success game. The marriage game. The war game. The life game. The race game. The religion game. That’s okay. I play them all, to some extent. Or have played them. But the difference in you and me is that I know I’m playing.”

“What do you really want?” I said. “Because if you want my brother, you won’t get him. I couldn’t give him to you if I wanted to. He went out of state and didn’t tell me where, and I told him not to tell me.”

I tried to tell the lie as convincingly as I could.

The voice on the other end didn’t speak right away. I could hear him breathing, though.

Finally the voice said, “I’m going to accept that, because we only wanted him so we could have all the game pieces, but you, you have become one of the most important players in our game.”

“I thought I was an insignificant pawn,” I said.

“Not anymore. As for your brother, we will, at least for the moment, consider him removed from the board.”

“Then what’s the new plan?” I asked.

“We want you to wait. And this phone. It’s a one-time shot, baby. When I hang up I destroy it. You can’t find me by this phone, and if you want to stay in the game, you got to hang tight. Hang tight and wait for instructions. They will come soon. Don’t call the cops. Keep the high yellow out of it. One false move, and this pretty girl of yours, who, by the way, is without clothes, only a bathrobe, will be a whole lot less pretty. So again, wait for instructions.”

“I hope the instructions will be briefer than the line of shit I’ve been hearing.”

“Have you ever seen a woman skinned?” the voice said. “It is quite a process. And the women, they are very noisy during the process.”

I was about to respond when the connection was dropped.

“Sonofabitch,” I said, and raised the phone to toss it, then thought better of it. I closed it and shoved it into my pocket.

“Well,” Booger said, stretching out on the couch, “we got plenty of beer.”

I was sitting in my one really comfortable chair, having just explained to him in a nutshell all that had been said to me.

“There’s nothing funny about this, Booger.”

“Am I smiling?”

“You are.”

“You know me. I get curious, I smile. First thing I’d consider is how much this gal means to you. She’s just like a good poke, well, they’re making new pussy every few minutes.”

“What in hell are you saying, Booger?”

“I’m saying, she don’t mean that much to you, me and you can pack up your car and go back to my bar, or damn near anyplace you want to go until the money runs out, then we can make some more and go somewhere else.”

“It’s not like that for me,” I said.

“I know it isn’t. But I had to say it. Thing is, I understand what the guy told you. He makes sense. It’s true.”

“Sometimes, when I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about things, stuff he says makes sense,” I said. “Rest of the time, not so much.”

“All that matters is that he believes it.”

“Or that they do,” I said. “He keeps saying we. ”

Booger studied me for a long moment, like maybe it was the first time he had ever looked at me. He said, “On your scale, do I rate somewhere?”

“You’re on the scale, Booger.”

“Where?”

“You’re on it. That’s as good as I can say. I’ve kind of got other things on my mind right now.”

Booger took a swallow of his beer. “All right,” he said, still not looking right at me. “That’ll do. That Caroline girl, she’s not dead.”

“What?”

“The picture they sent of the three dead girls. The Caroline girl. Way I figure it, she’s not dead. At least that’s not her in the picture.”

Booger got the photo, put it on the table. “I thought this looked wrong before, but we got caught up in other business. I been thinking on it again. It’s Photoshopped, my friend. What you got here is the girl in the middle, twice. Ronnie it says. The one called Caroline, that’s Ronnie again, but with a blond wig on. It’s shot in the same place, and they’ve covered her up some so she’ll look different, and it’s a reverse image, but it’s her. You see that little mole on Ronnie’s cheek? I got a good look at it earlier. When we were in the church with her body. The mole is prominent, even with her skin rotting. The mole is on the other side of her cheek now, in the picture, and the blond wig makes her look a little different, but look at those empty eye sockets, the eyes are near closed up just the same as the girl in the middle, and there’s a little wrinkle in the eyelid that’s on both the body with the Caroline label and the one with the Ronnie label.”